Romanticism as a Mode within which to Work: Impersonality and Emotion in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts and Peter Riley’s Distant Points

1The first time in History—or Prehistory—when burial became individual seems an appropriate starting-point for an epic of lyricism, all the more so when we consider that the bodies were not simply placed in the earth but, so the theory goes, laid out diagrammatically to form a graphic representation of the individual’s finished life. Thus the Neolithic remains which are central to Riley’s project in Distant Points, recurring throughout the sequence, in fact turn out to be texts. For instance, ‘lying East-West facing upwards Right hand on Right shoulder Left arm across the body... Beyond his feet to the East a row of three small circular pits or stake-holes....’1 The archaeologists’ problem of how to read and reconstruct these textual relics echoes the problem of how to read the poem sequence, itself composed of textual relics, of scraps of secondhand writing. As a preliminary introduction to this let us consider the following lines: ‘separately, but all on the same axis,’ and again: ‘separately, and on different horizons but the two bodies in almost exactly the same position’; (DP 72, 9) these extracts primarily describe the position in ancient tumuli of groups of skeletons, but they also echo the way an impersonal poetic discourse draws fleetingly into its ken the discrete, disconnected reader. The reader who, paradoxical as it may seem, is offered an intense and intimate sense of self, even as impersonality prevails.

2The inscription of the individual has travelled far since those early tumuli; its zenith with Romanticism is well behind us and the latter half of the twentieth century has, by many accounts, thrown the individual into disarray. Indeed, ‘can neo-liberalism leave the individual intact?’ asks Dany-Robert Dufour.2 What I would like to discuss here are two poets whose work engages with the would-be opposition between emotion and impersonality and offers ways round it. If emotion is life to the subject and impersonality ontological death, how can poetic forms integrate the modern world while answering the needs of the subject? How can they acknowledge the impersonality inherent in language while giving it a personal twist? First, an economy of ecopoetics helps ground the subject through imagining a state of nature; second, an economy of splitting, splicing and spilling over invites the reader to a partnership in reconstruction. In both cases we are concerned with a poetic language which adapts modernist and/or postmodernist strategies, only to adopt what is ultimately a Romantic ethos.3 This can indeed be said of Peter Riley’s book Distant Points, which contains the first two sections of a long sequence entitled Excavations, the remainder of which is to be published in 2004, and of the Northern Modernist Basil Bunting, particularly in his 1965 masterpiece, Briggflatts. My contention here is that Romanticism is reinstated or reinvented by these poets as a mode within which to work.

3Emotion, of course is a Romantic keyword, derived as it is from the Latin emovere or movement, which is one of the characteristics of all living things. The philosopher Henri Bergson describes feeling as something which ‘reaches our consciousness with the thousand fleeting nuances and the thousand deep echoes which make of it something absolutely our own’4—absolutely our own. This argues for a reading of the terms emotion and impersonality as an opposition between the personal or specific and the general or generic. However, if emotion is movement, is life, this is not life as we know it, for life as we know it is mostly, for Bergson, a matter of impersonality. It is organized around useful action, for which utilitarian generalisations are sufficient. According to him, ‘the intimate and personal aspects of our states of mind, those which are peculiar to our own experience, most often elude us,’ indeed ‘the individuality of things eludes us, even that of our own self,’ (Bergson 1940, 118) such that ‘all that we perceive of our own feelings is their impersonal aspect.’ It is therefore the role of the artist or poet, who is ‘naturally detached’ from a life of action and endowed with a ‘virginal way of seeing, hearing or thinking,’ to reveal the things of the world or of our own consciousness that ordinarily would remain hidden. Riley’s Distant Points, for instance, has lines such as this: ‘Hollows in the earth, the secrets of our hearts declaimed from ridge to ridge as white tumuli, writing the edge of belonging on a winter arch,’ (DP 249, 32) where the cold impersonality of death is tempered by the soft comfort of warm hollows, its intractable abstraction broken down by the plural and by the close convergence with our intimate feelings (‘the secrets of our hearts’). Both these poetic languages undertake to accomplish this unveiling, both deploy strategies pertaining to impersonality, yet nevertheless elicit from us the thrill of self-recognition, revealing us to ourselves as we obscurely felt ourselves to be, but never until now had words for. What this amounts to, within both modernism and postmodernism, is a neoromantic phenomenology, concerned with lifting the Bergsonian veil on things of the world and of the mind, accordingly bridging the would-be gap between the human and the non-human, the particular and the general, emotion and impersonality.

4Romanticism has been described as ‘the great endeavour to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, the conscious and the unconscious,’5 and Denis Bonnecase describes Wordsworth’s Prelude as ‘an epic of interiority’ and argues that the self is objectified in Romantic poetry—that it even used objective correlatives well before Eliot coined the term.6 By the time we get to Bunting, however, and all the more so Riley, the notion of specific correlation has become less operative and the focus is on the objectivity. What we seem to move towards is less a polarisation of the terms than a kind of contiguity or continuity; we could mention Bunting’s objectivism, or his sonata form, where the movement from exposition to development to recapitulation is a way not to elicit specific emotions, as with the correlative (‘that particular emotion,’ wrote Eliot7), but to provide an impersonal framework for emotion. Another form of impersonal emotion can be seen in Bunting’s economy of ecopoetics, which I have discussed in a previous article,8 but would like to focus on briefly here. Ecopoetics is a poiesis (a ‘making’) of the oikos (the ‘home’ or ‘dwelling-place’), where oikos refers here to the earth we live on or nature, which humanity can be said to be both ‘a part of and apart from.’ While the Romantics’ starting-point was the ‘apart from’ aspect, the severance, ecopoetics leans towards seeing humanity as ‘a part of’ nature. Indeed it regards poetic language as ‘a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature, though it also has a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of its own utopian vision.’9 If Romantic poetry used nature to help construct the human self, ecopoetics critiques the universalising tendencies inherent in Romanticism and posits that now the earth needs the poet to help it—and humanity—survive. Thus ecopoetics favours the genus, where humanity is concerned, the singular species, where nature is concerned. It constitutes a broadly conceived Romanticism in which nature is not merely subordinated to our spiritual needs, but brought into being through language for its own sake—and its own safety. As Heidegger writes, ‘By disclosing the being of entities in language, the poet lets them be.’10

5Bunting’s Briggflatts stakes its claim for singularity and even marginality in numerous ways, not the least of which is through the poetic language itself. The belief that language is inherently impersonal is a given of Bergson’s theory of language as of Bunting’s practice, the challenge to the poet being to work that impersonal medium into something which will allow for emotional truth. ‘For words’ as Bergson writes, ‘(except proper nouns) designate genres. The word, which registers only the most common function of a thing, only its most banal aspect, slips in between it and us and would conceal its form from our view if this same form were not already hidden behind the needs which created the word itself.’ (Bergson 1940,117) And we have in Part II of Briggflatts a critique of rational-intellectual language, shown to lead to alienation, self-disgust and sterility: ‘He lies with one to long for another, / sick self-maimed, self-hating, / obstinate, mating / beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born.’ (CP 47) It is this that his poetic language works to counteract; throughout the 717-line poem, certain words and images recur and evolve, weaving themselves into different situations and emotional contexts and telling their story of love, loss and reconciliation, while taking on associations— the atmosphere of a specific landscape, a peculiar poet-in-nature relationship. Such words or images thus come to be read as metonymies, or rather indices, defined by Pierce as words or images related to the thing they represent neither by resemblance, as with icons, nor by virtue of a law or convention, as with symbols, but by existential contiguity.11 With the effect therefore that they are felt to be intimately linked, that the language and the scenery are part of the same fabric. In the following example, the word ‘links’ is first used with its precise geographical meaning, rising ground, but it also picks up the thread of an earlier use of the term in connection with the flawed chainmail of the Viking Bloodaxe, ‘Loaded with mail of linked lies,’ thus commenting self-reflectively on this poeisis based on forging links to make a chain devoted to emotional truth, not lies:

Shepherds follow the links,
Sweet turf studded with thrift;
Fell-born men of precise instep
Leading demure dogs
From Tweed and Till and Teviotdale,
With hair combed back from the muzzle,
Dogs from Redesdale and Coquetdale
Taught by Wilson of Telfer. (CP 61)

6The first line answers an earlier, provocative line of metatextual commentary: ‘Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing,’ (CP 57) and the shepherds are not naïve inhabitants of a state of nature but initiates, competent readers of nature as text, or of the text as nature, moving freely between the two; on the one hand we have the phrase ‘fell-born,’ where ‘fell’ occurs ten times overall and shimmers back through the poem as text; on the other it is a word denoting a local geographical feature, which, together with the precise description and proper nouns, are indexes of a specific landscape. The shepherds are thus posited as figures of the poet, standing Janus-like at the junction between word and world, culture and nature, articulating yet attenuating the ecopoetic dilemma that we are both ‘a part of and apart from nature.’

7One of the ways in which modernist poetry sought to break with the Romantic voice of emotion was to eschew the all-purpose pentameter, its fluidity and flexibility, in favour of new rhythms. As Pound, Bunting’s mentor, put it in Canto 81, ‘To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.’12 A new rhythm or metrics had to be wrought which would not simply recede to let the emotion progress, but, through juxtaposition and parataxis, draw attention to the text as verbal, vocal production. This is an important stage in the ontologisation of the signifier, the would-be severance of the link between signifier and signified13; —unless, that is, the experiment with rhythm leads as with Bunting to a phenomenology, an unveiling of sorts, in his case an ecopoetic one. Here are the opening lines of Briggflatts:

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
Descant on Rawthey’s madrigal.
Each pebble its part
For the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
Black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely,
Chase hurdling shadows
Morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
And through the dale
Furrows fill with may,
Paving the slowworm’s way. (CP 43)

8Here the impersonal materiality of language, belonging to all and nobody, is pressed upon the reader or listener by the heavily-stressed verse and insistant alliteration and assonance—reminiscent of the Nordic epics the poem draws upon. This is not free verse, not ‘the true voice of feeling’ as Herbert Read put it, but an intricate musical patterning of sound and rhythm. The appeal is to the body—the organic body through which we are primarily conjoined to all living things. Impersonality of emotion can thus be said to characterise the overall signifier of the poem, that is, a signifier in which the human and the non-human are interwoven, placed side by side and drawn close, to suggest a neoromantic signified: a dream or vision of dwelling.

9This onus on contiguity is also to be found in Riley’s Distant Points with its peculiar economy of splitting, splicing and spilling over. As can be seen from the printed extracts, the poem makes ostentatious use of collage techniques with its various typescripts and its use of juxtaposition, fragmentation and a diversity of register and discourse which is nevertheless polarized around a scientific prose concerned with facts and materiality, and a high-flown poetic meditation. Clearly impersonality prevails; the first person singular does appear in the first poem, but only as an intertextual voice, in bold print, a fragment of Renaissance poetry. Even as it meets the eye or ‘I,’ therefore, the ego as transcendent Cartesian entity is baffled. The pronoun ‘I’ occurs for the first time in standard typeface three pages on: ‘I come to warm my hands, and deliver a letter,’ (DP 88, 11) but there is nothing to indicate a stable referent, and as the poem unfolds the same indeterminacy holds for the other personal pronouns. The following line shows a wholesale scepticism about any referent for the plural pronoun ‘we’: ‘Bridge of flesh the child believes in plural pronouns, talks of “us”.’ (DP C.83, 21) But this instability provides an opening, and the indeterminacy is paradoxically a reassurance of the tentative character of creative writing and its ever-to-be-renewed attempt to dismantle language’s easy, reflex appropriation of the world to reach some kind of personal truth, once bereft of the generic haze produced by words.

10The whole project of Riley’s poem sequence pertains to impersonality in the sense that on its most concrete level of representation the fragments of human bone and everyday objects are projected through the scientific discourse of Victorian archaeologists, Mortimer and Greenwell, so that the speaker of these poetic meditations—for a speaker there ultimately is—is to be pictured contemplating not a landscape or a set of museum pieces, but a book. The poet’s engagement with the human remains is thus not a direct one, but mediated through language. Extracts such as the following seem to feed right into the language trap, the emotion/impersonality dichotomy, as if to suggest that there is no escape from impersonality, no access to experience, no ways with words, and that the derisory lot of the modern poet is to make do with secondhand lines and a theory of the self which envisages its entrapment in the surrounding cultural formulations: ‘and survives, a few fragments of someone else’s speech,’ (DP 62, 18) or: ‘The past speaks me in bitter fragments towards the impossible and the sign is close to the head.’ (DP 211, 14) But the key words here are ‘survives’ and ‘sign,’ and, like Bunting’s, Riley’s language should be conceived of as action which at the same time acknowledges its enslavement to inaction through the in-built impersonality of the generic value of words, as well as through the never-ending process of iterative predication. The same words, the same Aristotelian subject-predicate structure pregnant with words which are still-born in their attempt at novelty.

11In what, then, does this ‘action’ consist? A closer look will reveal that the fragments are not merely juxtaposed but joined, as in carpentry, or, in nautical terms, not just split but also spliced, so that on either side of the join there is an overlap, allowing each side to spill over into the other; indeed, ‘Meaning spills, over the edge,’ (DP 57-55-58, 51) we read in Distant Points. The effect of this is that the two poles, scientific prose and poetry, objective description and subjective meditation, flow into and literally in-fluence each other. Keith Tuma observes that the archaeological prose has been ‘invariably rearranged, condensed,’ while the Renaissance lyrics are often ‘misremembered,’ so that the haunting recurrence of the factual descriptions of bodies in the tombs ‘gain[s] an affective weight.’14 Thus the porosity of the genres enhances the reappearance of emotion in unexpected places.

12Moreover, the spikiness of the parataxis is in part illusory; according to Tom Lowenstein, the text ‘goes a step further than the more familiar [technique] of montage or collage,’15 indeed, it displays an aesthetics of integration rather than of contrasts.16 This is the frame for what I propose as the main principle of composition here: syntactical punning. I mean by this the way in which the signifying chain allows for two—or more— different readings, a sort of pervasive syntactical ambiguity which spurs the reader into active partnership. Within this notion of punning there is on the one hand the pivotal word or phrase, which acts as a sort of hinge between two fragments, on the other the interpolated phrase, usually set off by bold print or a special font and inserted into the standard typeface. First, let us take the pivot. An example is the word ‘earth’ in the following extract: ‘And the heart floats above in a small boat / over a crack in the earth of sand and clayey matter, which formed an eminence, being more resistant than the surrounding subsoil to denudation.’ (DP 208, 13) The distinctness and autonomy of the first fragment is brought out by the antithesis opposing the heart and the earth, where the former is the abstract nebulous one pertaining to love and the ethereal soul (‘the heart floats’), and the latter the prosaic material clod (‘a crack in the earth’). This opposition is undermined, however, by means of the well-known anagram, here a near epanalepsis: heart and earth, which stresses the interchangeability of the two notions, so that the boundary between the human and the non-human, and between life and death, is challenged. Meanwhile, the word ‘earth’ acts as a hinge or pivot between the two separate fragments, also contrasting, the first emotional and metaphorical, the second material and literal, so that it can be read as a sort of pun playing on the general and the particular; for if we consider ‘earth’ as belonging to the first fragment, it reads as we have seen as a general concept, as the substance underfoot, while if we link it to what follows, it is granted defining characteristics which ground it to the particular: ‘sand and clayey matter.’ So there is a degree of ‘play’ in the structure.

13Here is an example of the second principle of composition, the interpolated phrase: ‘...—armature of memory and affection, relinquishment of desire—wrapped in his own sight perish in despair / die for the fair and other (wares, treasures, trash)...’ (DP 233, 8) Here the interpolated phrase, which owes its poetic unity to rhyme and metre, interrupts a host-sentence which is then resumed. On the one hand we have an impression of disjointed thought and the free association of ideas, on the other we have an eloquent illustration of Winnicottian subject-object mediation, where the lyric is a subjective-object, filled with both a personal and a cultural significance. Within this dislocation and disconnectedness, therefore, we have linearity, and the discourse, even as it unfolds, folds back upon itself with an effect that is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of Foucault’s fold or ‘pli’: ‘one must find the means to fold the line, so as to make an inhabitable zone in which to reside, face things, take off from, breathe—in a word, think. Fold back the line so as to find the means to live upon it, with it—a matter of life or death.’17 A decisive break, clearly, with the never-ending iteration of the subject-predicate structure.

14Moreover, as well as the porosity of the fragments and discourses, words and phrases such as ‘folded in,’ ‘pains of succession’ or ‘commerce,’ and semantic paradigms such as the bowl or the delivered letter, recur, with an effect of turning back to pick up loose threads and improvising with them, trying them out in another context. It is noteworthy that these recurrences are not solidified into symbols; they are both images within and comments upon the lyrical meditation, by which I mean not just the poetic voice or ‘pole,’ but the poetic language as a whole, resembling as it does not a finished product, a neatly packaged poem ready for a structuralist-style interpretation, ‘double-sealed, signed and delivered,’ (DP 1, 7) as we read in the first poem of Distant Points—which is to say dead —, but as unfinished, as work in progress and regress, restlessly unfolding and folding back upon itself and summoning the reader fleetingly, tentatively, to find a voice for emotion. Donald Winnicott writes, ‘I think there is use for a term for the root of symbolism in time, a term that describes the infant’s journey from the purely subjective to objectivity.’18 Or again Deleuze, reading Bichat through Foucault’s eyes, ‘It was quite probably Bichat who proposed the first major modern conception of death, by presenting it as violent, plural and coterminous with life. Instead of seeing it as a fixed point, as did the Ancients, he saw it as a line which we are constantly confronted with and which we cross and recross until it stops.’ (Deleuze 1990, 150) Here is another example: ‘[So my journey ended [moulded in the substance of arrival] I depart].’ (DP 1, 7) The syntactical ambiguity makes death also new life, the end also a beginning, while the indeterminacy of the pronouns puts out of reach the usual facile availability of self-identification, the stultifying routine of the generic coating of words and syntax, forever rounding us up into collective perception and thought, and leaves the reader high and dry, all bearings lost, until the discomfort of this situation acts as a spur or impetus to re-personalise language through an ever-to-be-renewed poeticisation: ‘Yet the loss, folded into history, sails adroit in the clay ship over commerce and habit...’ (DP C.39) There is no solidification into symbols as with Eliot’s ‘objective correlatives,’ no coherent system beyond the poetry, no onus on the end result of the meditation;—indeed, as for the Romantic philosopher Hegel, the end result is nothing but a ‘lifeless universal’ or a ‘dead carcass’ discarded on the wayside by the process of becoming—19; instead we have once again indexes, defined we remember by their existential contiguity with the thing represented. Thus the relics unearthed in the tumuli are indexes of the long forgotten individual lives, while the enfolding/unfolding fluidity of the poetic language is an index of the ongoing but ever-to-be-reaffirmed life of lyricism, believed dead.

15Words are generic, the material signifier common property, subject-predicate repetition never-ending. The poems I have chosen to present are among those which seem to me to acknowledge this, even as they resist it, and to offer the fragmented, far-flung subject not merely a mirror, but an active partnership in reconstruction—a Winnicottian transitional or potential space for subject-object mediation.20 The imbalance found in contemporary culture in favour of impersonality may therefore be redressed—on condition that the impersonality serve not just to obstruct emotion, but also to enhance it, and the poem is finally not only an invitation for a voyage to distant points, but an ontological home-coming.